The New Christian Zionism

Fresh Perspectives on Israel and the Land

Gerald R. McDermott, Gerald R. McDermott

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830894383
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Can a theological case be made from Scripture that Israel still has a claim to the Promised Land? Christian Zionism is often seen as the offspring of premillennial dispensationalism. But the historical roots of Christian Zionism came long before the rise of the Plymouth Brethren and John Nelson Darby. In fact, the authors of The New Christian Zionism contend that the biblical and theological connections between covenant and land are nearly as close in the New Testament as in the Old. Written with academic rigor by experts in the field, this book proposes that Zionism can be defended historically, theologically, politically and morally. While this does not sanctify every policy and practice of the current Israeli government, the authors include recommendations for how twenty-first-century Christian theology should rethink its understanding of both ancient and contemporary Israel, the Bible and Christian theology more broadly. This provocative volume proposes a place for Christian Zionism in an integrated biblical vision.

- PART ONE -

THEOLOGY

AND

HISTORY

1

A HISTORY OF SUPERSESSIONISM

Getting the Big Story Wrong

Gerald R. McDermott

◆

The Bible is extraordinarily complex. While the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers rightly insisted that its basic message of salvation could be understood by the simplest of sinners, they also believed that its preachers needed extensive training to be able to understand its many subtleties and profundities. They also knew that it is impossible to interpret the Bible rightly without having the right framework or lens through which to read it. The little stories could not be understood without knowing the Big Story into which they fit. Using the wrong Big Story would cause Christians to misinterpret the hundreds of little stories in the Bible, not to mention the meaning of the myriads of details from ancient cultures in ancient times.

For this reason it is essential that we get the big picture right. As I mentioned at the beginning of the introduction, the New Christian Zionism insists that the story of Israel is central to the story of salvation. The latter is fundamentally misunderstood and distorted when it omits Israel and her story with God. The sheer size of the Hebrew Scriptures, which dwarf the New Testament, should have signaled this to the historic church. But so does the gospel story in the New Testament, which portrays Israel at the center.

The very first Gospel—Matthew—opens with a genealogy that proves that Jesus is descended from Abraham, the first Jew, through forty-two generations of Jews. Luke’s Gospel also contains a genealogy (Lk 3:23-38) that proves Jesus came from a long line of Jews going back to Abraham, and then all the way back to Adam. Apparently both Matthew and Luke believed it important to show that Jesus was connected to the history of Israel.

In her Magnificat, Mary suggests that the birth of the Messiah will be significant not only for all future “generations” but particularly for the history of Israel: this will show that God

has helped his servant Israel,

in remembrance of his mercy,

according to the promise he made to our ancestors,

to Abraham and to his descendants forever. (Lk 1:54-55, emphasis added)

If the incarnation was supposed to turn the focus away from Israel, as the supersessionist story has suggested, Mary did not get the text message. Her son would fulfill God’s promise—which was made not to the whole human race but to the first Jew and all his Jewish descendants. Of course we know that this fulfillment brought the promise of salvation to the world, but Mary here mentioned only the promise to the Jews.

Paul, long cast as the apostle to the Gentiles, supposedly took the focus off Judaism and showed that the gospel was really a universal message for all. It has often been claimed that Paul believed the days of Jewish particularity were over and the days of non-Jewish universalism had begun. God’s covenant with the Jews was done; he had transferred that covenant to the church. No longer would God be concerned with the Jews. They had forfeited their covenant because they had rejected the Messiah, Jesus.

This is what Christian theologian Kendall Soulen has termed the “punitive” version of supersessionism, the idea that God made a new covenant with the church that supersedes his old covenant with Israel because God was punishing Israel for not accepting her Messiah. Soulen’s two other kinds of supersessionism are “economic” (in God’s economy or administration of the history of salvation, Israel’s purpose was to prepare for the Messiah, so once he came, Israel had no more purpose) and “structural” (the history of salvation is structured so as not to need Israel in any integral way, except to serve as a negative example).1

Although Paul has been been read this way for centuries, his letters tell a different story. In Romans 9 and 11 he laments his fellow Jews who have not accepted Jesus as Messiah. He says that they cause him “great sorrow and unceasing anguish” (Rom 9:2). Yet he says “the covenants” still “belong” to them (Rom 9:4), and even though, “as regards the gospel,” they have become “enemies of God,” they still “are beloved” because of their “election,” which is “irrevocable” (Rom 11:28-29, my emphasis).

Galatians is the letter that is most often used to prove that Paul has dispensed with Jewish law in favor of a church that has left Israel behind. Yet even here he says the gospel is all about “the blessing of Abraham . . . com[ing] to the Gentiles” (Gal 3:14) because “the promises [of blessing] were made to Abraham and to his offspring” (Gal 3:16) so that getting saved means being in Abraham’s family: “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise” (Gal 3:29).2 In other words, the gospel means getting connected to Israel’s history, not getting away from it. In contrast, supersessionism—the idea that the church has superseded Israel because God’s covenant with Israel has been transferred to others—suggests that Israel has been left behind. Galatians says otherwise.

As chapters two through five will show, the New Testament develops what we have just seen in the genealogies and the Magnificat and Galatians—the intimate connection between Israel and the gospel. This is the constellation of connections that shows that Israel is essential not only to eschatology (the message of the old Christian Zionism) but to soteriology (in the New Christian Zionism). Israel is critical not only to the future (the old Christian Zionism) but also to our past and present (the New Christian Zionism). Not only to where Christians will be (the old Christian Zionism) but to what they are (the New Christian Zionism).

This constellation of connections is vivid in the New Testament, especially in its last book, Revelation. In that book, usually dated near the end of the first century, the new earth is centered in Jerusalem, whose twelve gates are inscribed with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel (Rev 21:12). So we can be confident that this Zionist vision, which the middle chapters of this book will show to have been prevalent in the New Testament, continued through at least the end of the first century.

In the mid-second century, when the synagogue was still very attractive to many Jesus-believing Jews and Gentiles, some of the former were tempted to jettison their new devotion to Jesus, and some of the latter were drawn to nonmessianic Judaism. Early church leaders responded by stressing the superiority of Jesus’ law to the Mosaic law. Their apologetic against the synagogue was so successful that their new version of salvation history—which declared that God had transferred the covenant from Israel to the church—became dominant.

Scholars as diverse as the Christian theologian Soulen and the Jewish historian/theologian Daniel Boyarin have agreed that second-century apologist Justin Martyr (100–ca. 165) played a key role in this transition of thinking among Jesus followers.3 They also agree that Justin was not the only early Christian thinker who proposed supersessionism,4 that the reasons for this transition were many and complex5 and that this comparison of Jewish law versus Christian law was only one of many factors involved. But most historians agree that Justin’s version of the biblical story caught on, and it was he who first applied to the church the term “true Israel.”6 The real story of salvation for Justin was the story of the Logos or eternal Word, which spoke to Jews in one way but in other ways to other cultures, especially the Greeks. Just as the Jews had their prophets, so too did the Greeks, Plato and Socrates among their foremost. Justin thought that Socrates had as much of the Logos as Moses. In fact, Christ “was and is the Logos who is in every man” and inspires whatever truth we find in the world (Justin, 2 Apol. 10). The Old Testament was important not because it was the revelation of the true God but because it predicted the true Logos. The law given at Horeb was already “old” and belonged to Jews alone; the new one from Christ has made the old one cease, and now the new one belongs to “all men absolutely.” God’s relationship to Israel therefore was physical and temporary, but his new relationship to the church was spiritual and permanent. As Oskar Skarsaune observes, Justin fell prey to exactly what Paul warned against: “Do not boast over the branches” (Rom 11:18).7

Irenaeus (ca. 145–202) is another early father of the church who helped make supersessionism the dominant model for later centuries. He is famous for having contributed the church’s first theology of history. Writing against Gnostics, who regarded matter as the creation of an evil god, he explained how the true God created matter and in fact took human matter onto himself in order to restore the broken image of his human creatures.

Irenaeus’s grand metaphor was God as pedagogue. He gave the Mosaic law to the “headstrong” Jews because they needed it for their spiritual education; it was not for all times and all places. Their prescriptions were “temporal,” “carnal” and “earthly,” calling their users to another law that is “eternal,” “spiritual” and “heavenly.” Many precepts were included in the old law because of the Jews’ “hardness of heart.”8

After the Jewish law, the incarnation was the next stage in God’s pedagogy of the human race. God used it to bring us into his very being, by what Irenaeus called “recapitulation.” By this he meant that God started over again on the creation. Because Adam’s sin significantly marred the divine image in humanity and prevented the Father from being able to bring human beings into communion with himself, he created the perfect man in Jesus—the man Adam was intended to be. Because Jesus was perfect, without sin, the Father could have communion with him. And because Jesus’ human nature was human, like ours, we could have communion with God—because Jesus’ human nature was the go-between that now linked us with God.

This was all very elegant. But it made the history of Israel, which made up most of the Bible, functionally and theologically unnecessary. It suggested that the story of Israel was simply educational, teaching the Gentiles how not to proceed, thus preparing the rest of us for the Second Adam. Hence it was economic supersessionism. Because it made Israel unnecessary, skipping from the first Adam directly to the Second, it was also structural supersessionism. Irenaeus also made use of punitive supersessionism by arguing that because the Jews repudiated their Messiah, they were “disinherited from the grace of God.”9

Later church fathers perpetuated this pattern. As we will see in the next chapter, Origen reasoned that if the Messiah with his covenant had come, then the covenant with the Jews had ended—or true Israel is the spiritual band that follows Jesus as Messiah.10 The fourth century and later brought new ill feeling into what had been, at least for Justin and Irenaeus, more of a reasoned debate.11 Chrysostom (ca. 349–407), for example, preached that he thought Jews murdered their own children to offer as sacrifices to the devil, and exclaimed, “I hate the Jews.”12 Augustine was far milder, acknowledging that strictly speaking the church is the ne...